Many thousands of undergraduates have walked under the stilts of the Raymond Priestley Building, which forms part of Melbourne University’s great wind tunnel, with no thought of the person commemorated by its name. He was, in fact, a remarkable man. His four years as Vice-Chancellor (1935–38) emerge in extraordinary detail and intimacy, thanks to this edition of his journals.

Raymond Priestley was a man of many parts: a soldier; the geologist on Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition (1908–9); a member of the Northern Party of Scott’s expedition (1911–12); a friend of Wittgenstein; a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and holder of a number of important administrative posts in that university. He went to Melbourne University as its inaugural Vice-Chancellor in 1935, and lasted four years. His letter of resignation referred to the inadequate funding that had made his position untenable. There were other reasons, as set out in Ronald Ridley’s admirable Introduction. Priestley’s plans for Melbourne University were humane, inclusive and progressive. He was much preoccupied with the necessity to make possible a university community that did not depend only upon residential college life. The focus of this ambition was a new Union for students, to give them a sense of community and belonging in a campus singularly lacking that dimension in 1935. He was also concerned with the preservation of what used to be called ‘academic freedom’, that is to say the protection of discourse within the university from more or less crude censorship, whether from outside the university or within it. His views were liberal, and caused him trouble.